The name Adele Zaikman will mean nothing to most Americans. That is precisely the problem. Somewhere in the past few weeks, a private citizen named Adele Zaikman became the subject of an online pile-on—a small, ugly skirmish in our endless culture war—and then, just as quickly, vanished from the feed. The mob moved on. The rest of us never noticed. And in that forgetting, we lost another piece of something we used to call community.
Here is what we know, or think we know: Zaikman, by all accounts an ordinary woman living an ordinary life, was caught in the crosshairs of a viral moment. Maybe she said something clumsy. Maybe a neighbor recorded her. Maybe a stranger decided she was the villain of the day. Within hours, her name was a hashtag, her face a meme, her livelihood threatened by people who had never met her and never would. Then the algorithm, merciful and merciless in equal measure, served up the next outrage. Adele Zaikman was old news.
We have built a society that runs on this cycle. We wake up, we scroll, we find someone to hate, we destroy them, we forget them. It happens so fast that we no longer register the wreckage. A woman's life can be upended before lunch and erased from memory by dinner. And we call this discourse. We call this accountability. We call this being informed.
But ask yourself: when did we decide that every clumsy moment deserved a global audience? When did we agree that a stranger's worst day should become our entertainment? The answer is gradual and damning. We didn't decide. We drifted. We let the platforms set the terms, and the terms are simple: outrage is currency, and human beings are the coins.
The Zaikman episode—if it even merits the word—is not really about her. It is about the neighbors who didn't defend her, the coworkers who stayed quiet, the friends who quietly distanced themselves to avoid the splash. It is about a country where the safest move is always to say nothing, to let the mob have its way, to wait for the next name to trend. That is not a society. That is a crowd with Wi-Fi.
We used to have a word for the instinct to protect the vulnerable among us, even the imperfect ones. We called it decency. It was not partisan. It did not require a hashtag. It simply meant that when the pack turned on someone in your midst, you stood between them and the teeth. We have traded that instinct for a like, a share, a smug little comment. And we are poorer for it.
The real scandal of Adele Zaikman is not whatever she did or didn't do. The real scandal is how easily we let a fellow American be devoured and then turned back to our phones without a second thought. If we cannot summon the will to care about the person next door—or the person trending—then we have already lost something we cannot download, cannot restore, and cannot pretend we never had.